WHEN LEFTIST ACTION BECOMES STORY: AN INTERVIEW WITH RAWYA EL-CHAB
In conversation with Toney Brown
In the final weeks of 2025, actress Rawya El-Chab will be at the center of The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with a screening of Danielle Arbid’s film In the Battlefields (2004), a coming of age story about 12 year old Lina, her relationship with her family, and her friendship with her Aunt’s servant, 18-year old Siham (played by Rawya). The screening will take place on Monday November 24th as part of BrickFlix.
On December 5th, Rawya begins a three week run of her newest play Crossing the Water, a chronicle of life under military occupation. It interlaces personal memory with historical events, as her family and comrades flee the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. Crossing the Water is the second piece in a trilogy about the decline of the Lebanese left at the end of the 20th Century.
I met Rawya over a zoom call. She had just gotten out of a production meeting for Crossing the Water. I saw a vulnerable look in her eyes. The look of someone about to embark on the trials and tribulations of mounting an experimental theater show in NYC. Should I be a good friend and offer kind words of support and solidarity or should I use this as an opportunity to clown on her? I chose the latter. Who doesn’t like to bust balls? Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Toney Brown: Raywa, why didn’t you tell me you were in a movie?!
Rawya El-Chab: (laughs) I’ve been in several movies.
TB: Memory is foggy. But a few years ago, I recall seeing a listing on Screen Slate about a showing of In the Battlefields at Anthology Film Archives. I saw your name and thought, “wait. THE Rawya El-Chab? Can’t be!” Were you aware of the screening?
REC: (laughs) I wasn’t, and to answer your question, my relationship with movies is a little bit complicated. I’ve always felt more restrained when I’m working in movies. I am a lot more at the mercy of the director, their expectations, the boundaries of emotions, and the way the director wants something to come out of the process. I always feel like this is not my work. I’m just being paid to be in it. Whereas, when I’m on the stage, I have nothing but to be present all the time.
Since we do not have a movie industry in my country, we do not finance our own movies. To make a movie means to get it financed from abroad. It made me recognize the relationship of power that we had, over our narrative, how it’s told, and the price we had to pay to share our stories in our own words. We had to take a big risk.
TB: “The Filmmaking Biz” came to Lebanon.
REC: You have a producer who’s telling you, oh, you got to shoot your scene right now. Otherwise it’s not making it into the movie. This is Hollywood in a way. So we were all immersed in it. We were all wanting to give 110% out of our bodies to make a movie that would be spoken in our language and our way. Our director Danielle, was experimenting with these boundaries, limits, and the relationships that were present.
TB: I loved that the film experimented with the female gaze. Your character, Siham, is sexually involved throughout the film, but it’s the male characters that are objectified.
REC: Yes! What’s great about this movie, the director and DP were women. There was a good team of women on set. Danielle thought about all these moments prior to filming. The female gaze is a long term research project for her. She goes into each one of her movies, working on the female gaze, reminding people that women can look and objectify, and also men have bodies that can be looked at. It’s something that is always empowering. We discussed these scenes. My favorite sex scene is the one in the car. I had the power to participate in the casting of my scene partner. The guy was a dear friend of mine and we didn’t have an intimacy coordinator, per se.
TB: I don’t think they existed in 2003…
REC: (laughs) They didn’t. They didn’t exist. But it was a scene that was shot, you know? I think the particularity of being in the car and the way Danielle chose for the scene to be shot, made the man the object of my gaze, you know, because he came on top and it became all about him, doing this.
I think Danielle was exploring social life in the midst of civil war. There’s so much sexual tension and these moments are very important to remind people that there is life in the midst of struggle.
TB: Life is seen through the eyes of your co-star, Marianne Feghali, who plays Lina in the film. I find coming-of-age movies put a lot of emphasis on youthful innocence. But this story gives the protagonist more agency.
REC: I think what’s cool about this movie is that Lina is not portrayed as an innocent lady. Lina is alive and making choices. She chooses to snitch on my character.
TB: Yes. Snitches get stitches. Before we get to that, can you describe the social status of Siham?
REC: It is a form of indentured servitude. Endless. People can get forced into it or choose it because they grow up in extreme poverty in a village, and are left with no other alternative because it is difficult to survive. They get connected through family, friends, distant relatives, with the promise of work, education, and marriage. But, for a while, that human being is stuck. It’s important to note that Siham was sent to this indentured servitude before she turned 18. So she didn’t really have a choice.
TB: So Siham plots her escape only to have her friend Lina snitch. The film climaxes with a confrontation between you both. There is no forgiveness and your character makes their move to escape.
REC: When Siham escapes, we don’t know what will happen to her. I think the ending of the film puts into question: What will happen to Beirut? After the war, there was so much building and cleaning of the country. Neoliberal policies were being shoved down our throats. We once had good socialist protections and slowly all those protections were being taken away from us. 10,000 people were kidnapped during the war. The policies we were forced into kept the wounds of war open. We didn’t have closure. The ghosts from the war are still in the city.
TB: In the Battlefields is a coming of age family drama with the Lebanese Civil War in the background. Your upcoming play Crossing the Water is a memory piece that takes place around a similar time period, but focuses on the Israeli Invasion of Beirut. Can you talk about the differences between the two types of war?
REC: In the Battlefields, it’s Civil War. You kind of know the guys who have guns in your neighborhood because they are your neighbor, your neighbors kids. You don’t like it but you know them and there is a relationship that is possible. An invasion is different. You have people you do not know come into your country and who do not necessarily speak your language.
Crossing the Water is the second part of a trilogy that I’m working on. It comes from a deep concern that I want to understand what happened to the left in Lebanon. There was a very strong leftist movement through several parties, several factions, but suddenly this movement made place for a radical Islam.
You know, Lebanon is made out of so many different religions. Having the left was a possibility to think about the future of all these people living together. Then suddenly, all these people decided to give up on this ideology. They were disappointed. There were also political calculations that were made and I wanted to understand what really happened.
TB: How did you go about piecing these memories together?
REC: So I started going back in time to the year 1985, then worked backwards. 1985 is the last bullet that the left in Lebanon shot under the banner of Jammoul. Jammoul is the Lebanese National Resistance Front, which gathered all leftist factions that wanted to resist the occupation, to go back to armed liberation practices. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. People were already done with Jammoul. The people said, “okay, this is not working. You guys are not doing the job.” And for me, it was like, “oh, this is where the left, unconsciously or consciously, I don’t know, decided to become a story more than doing actual change on the ground.”
So it’s really about going back to this moment and trying to understand, okay, this is what was happening at this point during this invasion. History happens through archives, journals, articles. We have what’s being reported in the official and narrative. We have people telling stories from the ground. And we also have rumors.
Rumors are in between these two places, in between these stories people tell and the official narrative. Rumors are a very important part of history. They have to do with transfer of information, but they also have to do with the state in which these people are living, what is happening in people’s heads while they’re maneuvering this situation.
TB: You use the practice of Hakawati Theatre to share these stories, can you talk about that?
REC: I get my want to tell stories directly from my upbringing which revolves around storytelling. Hakawati is our original storytelling way. It’s very specific to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine culture. A Hakawati is somebody who tells a story. Who speaks a story. You can find Hakawati in coffeeshops. It also can be a mother telling stories to her children, or a grandmother sharing stories.
My culture revolves around epic storytelling, specifically around Imam Husayn ibn Ali. We tell this story every year over a ten day period and it is repeated every day to honor each character or hero. People gather and cry together and the stories get magnified all the time.
When I studied theater, the first works that I did were with Roger Assaf, who is a theater director and playwright that worked in the register of Hakawati storytelling. When I came to the US, I got to work with David Herskovitz, who has his own storytelling techniques, and I found a continuity with my own work. How we deconstruct and reconstruct a story and then show people that the story is now theirs to retell.
In the Battlefields screens at BrickFlix on Monday November 24 at The Brick.
Crossing the Water opens at The Brick on Friday December 5 and runs through Sunday December 21.